Modern medical facilities such as hospitals or emergency care facilities are often large and complex organizations. A medical facility may be organized into various branches or wings that specialize in a particular type of patient care and/or expertise. For example, a medical facility may have a radiology and/or radiography department that handles various medical imaging tasks such as X-ray and MRI for the medical facility. Patients requiring an X-ray, for example, must be transported to the radiology center or department.
Conventional radiography centers (e.g., as found in radiology departments in medical facilities) may include multiple radiography rooms each equipped with X-ray systems for exposing patients and image recording media (e.g., films, phosphor plates, etc.) to radiation, so as to acquire X-ray images of the patients for diagnosis, treatment, etc. Often, an exposed image recording medium is loaded into a holder or cassette for transporting the exposed medium from the room with the X-ray exposure system to a central processing center. For example, a cassette holding exposed film typically is hand-carried from the exposure area to a central chemical processing station associated with a main darkroom for developing the exposed film. A cassette holding an exposed phosphor plate typically is hand-carried from the exposure area to, for example, a mainframe CR scanner, which scans the phosphor plate to acquire the image stored thereon. Exemplary CR scanners are described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,624,438 entitled “SCANNING APPARATUS,” by Koren, which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety.
This general concept of workflow (i.e., radiation exposure in radiography rooms, and central processing elsewhere) typically dictates the architectural design of the X-ray room layout of a conventional radiography processing center (e.g., in a medical facility). In particular, in a typical layout, a patient corridor may be located in front of a row of X-ray exposure rooms, and a staff corridor may be located behind the row of X-ray exposure rooms, thereby enabling separate traffic flows of patients being imaged and technicians carrying the X-ray cassettes to a central processing area (e.g., main darkroom or a room having a CR scanner).
However, this workflow and organization model results in generally unnecessary traffic, inefficiency and requires significant coordination and organization as described in U.S. application Ser. No. 10/447,733 entitled “DISTRIBUTED AND REDUNDANT COMPUTED RADIOGRAPHY SYSTEMS AND METHODS,” by Koren ('733), which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety. The '733 application describes methods and apparatus for providing distributed and redundant CR systems to avoid “bottlenecks” and other inefficiencies in the central processing workflow architectures.